Review: Will Grayson, Will Grayson, by John Green and David Levithan

The lives of two guys named Will Grayson intersect as they look for love, friendship, and fabulousity in the greater Chicago area. The alternating chapters were so in the style of the two authors that I didn’t even have to check who had written which. Green’s Will is wordy, self-consciously … Continue reading

Mistik Lake, by Martha Brooks

Another conference speaker with whom I was unfamiliar. She’s also a jazz singer, and gave us a lovely impromptu a capella performance (just reinforcing the sense that I was at a folk festival). I’ll admit, I found her book tiresome. The prose is lovely, I guess, but it was a … Continue reading

My Most Excellent Year: a Novel of Love, Mary Poppins, & Fenway Park, by Steve Kluger

Three three-dimensional best friends, families that genuinely love each other, disability and homosexuality just tossed in like the normal parts of life they are, and it’s even set in Boston! Sold. The plot is complicated — there’s a deaf kid, a theater production, a wacky road trip to New York … Continue reading

The Bartimaeus Trilogy: The Golem’s Eye (bk. 2), by Jonathan Stroud

My main gripe with the first Bartimaeus was how much Nathaniel’s chapters dragged as compared with Bartimaeus’s. The Golem’s Eye ameliorates this problem by giving us plenty of the ever-delightful Bartimaeus, and adding a third point of view: Kitty, the young Resistance leader. Nathaniel is also older now, and more … Continue reading

Cybils: Prince of Persia, by A. B. Sina, et. al.*

Boyfriend E, video game fan extraordinaire, caught sight of this lying on my coffee table and cracked up. He played the original game as a kid, of course (if someone wants to fix that Wikipedia page, by the way, it could apparently use some fixing), and expected from the cover … Continue reading